Thursday, October 30, 2008

When The Dallas Morning News ran its story last Thursday about The Family Place's "provocative new campaign" on Dallas Area Rapid Transit buses, the agency, which assists victims of domestic abuse, said it had received few complaints. The ads, depicted above, began running on October 1, and DART spokesman Morgan Lyons told The News last week his agency likewise hadn't gotten a word of complaint.

Lyons says locals didn't seem to mind the ads when they began running at the beginning of the month. The first call he received about them came from KTVT-Channel 11, which was doing a story about how CBS Outdoor and Clear Channel Outdoor, billboard agencies, had refused to run the ads, which Lyons says met "community standards for the greater Dallas area," especially considering "the reputation of the Family Place."

But since Sacks started up his campaign, and posted a form letter easily filled out and e-mailed, "we've received probably over 1,000 e-mails," most, as he says, from well outside Dallas.

"And I've had a call from a newspaper in Hong Kong and an e-mail from New Zealand," he says. "And we had four folks come to the regularly scheduled board meeting last night and express concerns about the ads. But as of this morning, we had received fewer than a dozen responses to the online customer feedback form, and I haven't looked to see where those are from."

For now, the plan remains in place: The ads will run through the end of November. And Lyons says he's heard from Paige Flink, Family Place's executive director, that the ads have been effective. "They've been pleased with the response they've gotten in terms of calls from people needing help," he says. Flink was unavailable this morning.

Thank goodness that Sacks and his horde of cavemen have thus far failed to bully DART into removing these ads.